“Well, well, these Persians are hard to deal with. We let their pilgrims go over our frontier to Kerbela in droves, and say nothing; and when a few good peaceable fellows come over to pay their respects to the Sultan’s representative you have these complaints at once. So unneighbourly, you know.”
To drive a wily old Australian cow may be hard; but it is child’s play to getting an old Turk to do business when his instructions are to waste time.
So the frontier dispute dragged on ad infinitum till the British Consul left it to settle itself, and went back to Tabriz. The Russians could not allow a country where they had large interests to go to rack and ruin through anarchy, and the present practical occupation of northern Persia was the result.[{221}]
CHAPTER XI
A LAND OF TROUBLE AND ANGUISH (URMI TO VAN)
THE country between Urmi and Van is easy, as travel goes in Kurdistan; and, speaking normally, safe. High hills, rising to as much as 11,000 feet, cover the country; and one great mountain saddle, the Chokh range, has to be crossed. But the hills are rounded, and grass-grown in summer; and the valleys wide and fertile, though for the most part uncultivated, and carrying a scanty population. A long winter and heavy snowfall are natural at such an elevation, and a journey at that time of year is always a toilsome experience and may be a dangerous one. It is not pleasant, for instance (as once happened here to the writer), to find oneself in a position where baggage-horses can get neither forward nor back; and where the whole party has the duty of “humping” the loads and carrying them for some hours in deep snow.
That too zealous reformer, Mejid-es-Sultaneh, owns much property among these lower hills; and this fact is responsible for the development of a new type of village, the invention of that English gentleman to whom he assigned his property. It will be understood that “a good head of labour” is as necessary for a Persian estate now as it was for a mediæval manor in England; but conditions may make it difficult to maintain that desirable thing. Hence, when the Englishman found himself charged with a large depopulated estate, he bethought him of settling upon it the dispossessed Christians of Tergawar. They were put there upon the usual terms of the Persian village system, which deserves a word to itself.[{222}]
The “Lord of the country-side” who owns the land, assigns a certain district to a village. It is his business to provide seed-corn; and in this particular case he built the houses as well, though usually that is not necessary. The villagers then pay him, instead of a money rent, a proportion of the crop, varying from a third to a half of the corn grown. Vineyards pay the same proportion; but if you desire to grow melons, you must ask leave and pay a special rent; for this is a crop that is exhausting for the land, and still more for the water.
A big landlord will often own many villages; and in such cases he places a steward in charge of each, to compute the amount of produce due to him and to receive his proper share. It is easy to understand from this the method by which the “unjust steward” of the parable proposed to defraud his lord: neither is it at all difficult to sympathize with that lord’s “commendation,” in a land which still believes implicitly in the policy of “setting a thief to catch a thief,” and where it is recorded that Ahmed the Calamity and Hassan the Pestilence were made captains of the watch at Baghdad for no other reason than that “they excelled all men in villainy and tricks of cunning.”
Both sides profited by the arrangement in the Mejid-es-Sultaneh estate; the owner getting a good supply of labour for a previously unproductive property, and the villagers a new home in the land.
They were of course in some danger from Kurds; and it was to meet this that the new type of village was evolved by the English administrator—a type which is much to his credit as an amateur military engineer. In ordinary villages the flat-roofed shielings are huddled together without plan or defensibility. But in these, a square space of perhaps 2 acres was enclosed by a wall of mud brick some twelve feet high, with projecting towers at the corners and one good strong gate. Then the houses of the village were built against this wall on the inner side; their flat roofs forming an excellent “banquette” for the defence of the battlemented wall, while the towers provided a flanking fire. The central space was left clear, except for the village[{223}] church, and provided ample accommodation for the flocks. The Kurds came and reconnoitred, and cursed the inventive and innovating Englishman up hill and down dale. Half a dozen men with flint-locks could keep thirty of the best of them outside such a place; and we believe that no village built on this pattern has ever been seriously attacked.